Knowledge management through document management forms an important part of the knowledge creation and sharing lifecycle. A typical model of knowledge creation and sharing is cyclical, consisting of three main steps: synthesizing (search, gather, acquire and assimilate), sharing (present, publish/distribute), and servicing (facilitate document use for decision making, innovative creativity). Currently documents are considered static objects which only acquire new content when acted upon by an authorized user. A user's decision to read and modify a document, or to run a program on it which may change its contents (for example, by adding hyperlinks), is needed for the document to acquire new information.
This view of the document as a passive repository leads to the current situation in which most computers remain idle, documents sleeping on disks, unless a user is in front of the screen piloting the system. Instead of trying to do something useful, or trying to predict what a user would like to see associated with a document, documents just lie around doing nothing on inactive computers.
Both agent-based systems and content-based retrieval systems provide some management of information without user intervention. An agent is a software program that performs a service, such as alerting the user of something that needs to be done on a particular day, or monitoring incoming data and giving an alert when a message has arrived, or searching for information on electronic networks. An intelligent agent is enabled to make decisions about information it finds. Both such systems, however, consider documents to be fixed and static entities.
Many products provide various solutions for individual aspects of the overall problem of knowledge management: anticipatory services, unstructured information management, and visualization of information and knowledge. Watson, for example, from the InfoLab at the University of Northwestern, is a program which operates while a user is creating a document. Watson retrieves information as the user works, from which the user can select for further investigation. Information retrieved by Watson comes from a single service provider, and Watson stores the retrieved information in memory associated with Watson.
Online services such as Amazon.com offer zBubbles, which appear inside a menu bar at the top of the browser window. The zBubble travels with the user as he/she shops the Web, pointing to the best deals and products around. Netscape's “What's related service” works with the browser and accompanies the user as he/she surfs, providing useful information about the sites being viewed and suggesting related sites. Inxight's parabolic tree is an example of a system that organizes unstructured information and presents it in an intuitive format: a hyperbolic tree. All of these services treat documents as static objects.
Various products, such as commercial search engines, provide unstructured information, such as web pages, documents, emails etc. (which content may consist of text, graphics, video, or sound). Typical management services for unstructured information include: search and retrieval; navigation and browsing; content extraction, topic identification, categorization, summarization, and indexing; organizing information by automatic hyperlinking and creation of taxonomies; user profiling by tracking what a user reads, accesses, or creates create communities; etc.